


You're a Pal and a Confidant

by ListenListen223



Series: Thank You for Being a Friend [2]
Category: The Boys (TV 2019)
Genre: Arguably the healthiest relationship in canon, Arguably unhealthy relationship, Explicit Consent, F/M, Frenchie's childhood is it's own warning, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, nowhere else, within the relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:33:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26883697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ListenListen223/pseuds/ListenListen223
Summary: For a long time, Frenchie was alone. There was no one else like him, no one else who survived a childhood of being stolen and destroyed. No one else who molded their new life out of the carnage.He was alone.And then there was Cherie.
Relationships: Cherie/The Frenchman (The Boys)
Series: Thank You for Being a Friend [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1961419
Comments: 9
Kudos: 30





	You're a Pal and a Confidant

**Author's Note:**

> Content notes at the end

For a long time, Frenchie was alone. 

Other children like him, children snatched from their mothers, were only ever found dead. In America, the TV screens of motels and Times Square lit up with children gone missing. If Frenchie wormed his way into a good hotel room, he could flip through the channels in the middle of the night and find five programs about dead children. 

There were no children who survived. No children who stole their way into a new life and told no one who they were. Only him.

He was alone.

And then there was Cherie. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


Serge remembered the day things changed. 

Papa came out of nowhere and yanked him out from the table he was dozing under and pushed him onto a hotel bed. Serge studied him with wide eyes, not daring to question what was happening. Serge was not healed yet from the last time he asked a question. He would have to work off clues alone. 

Papa’s eyes were steady, as were his hands, as he closed handcuffs over Serge’s wrists. 

These were not new. Serge knew enough to tense up as they were put on for a margin of room around his wrists when he managed to relax. Papa didn't move him unbound anymore. He wouldn’t until Serge was perfectly obedient for months, and Papa accidentally gave him a chance to run again. 

He’d only found Serge in a Warsaw train station nine weeks ago. It would be months before Papa left him alone in a hotel room without chaining him to a radiator and dosing him out of his mind. 

Papa was sober, which made him most dangerous. Serge dared to look around the hotel room they’d only arrived in the night before. If they were moving, none of their belongings were coming along. They were spilled across the room from Papa’s favorite handgun to the tattered Hello Kitty blanket that made Serge sick to sleep under since a bad night three or four years ago. Maybe more years. Maybe less. 

It wouldn’t be the first time Papa spirited away with nothing but Serge in his arms. But Papa wasn’t leading him out the door into the Barcelona night, he was studying his son quietly. Intently. 

“You don’t want to know what’s happening?” 

Answering could be the wrong thing to do. Shaking his head or nodding could be the wrong thing to do. Doing nothing was certainly the wrong thing to do. 

“What’s happening?” Serge asked. 

“I won’t always be here to look out for you,” Papa said. 

_ Thank you God _

“What will you do if someone traps you? Takes you and chains you up, how will you get back to me?” 

He could not take another beating. He could not make any smart remarks about what a respite that would be, that Serge would let absolutely anyone else in the world take him and chain him up beside Papa. 

“I don’t know,” Serge said. 

Papa plucked the short chain between the handcuffs then sat down on a chair across from the bed. “Get yourself out.” 

_ Trick. _

_ Trick. _

_ Trick. _

“Do it in less than five minutes, and I’ll give you two of those rolls you like so much.” 

  
Serge didn’t see any food. But Papa sometimes stuck to his promises and he couldn’t let that chance go by. 

“What are the rules?” 

Papa smiled and Serge felt his idiotic heart warm at the crumb of praise. “Use anything in the room, this is the easiest it will be, my love. Time starts now.

Serge darted around the room, searching for any piece of metal, a knife, anything. Papa didn’t know that he’s tried this so many times before. Or maybe he did, and maybe that’s why before the five minutes are even up, he was lighting a cigarette and shaking his head. Waiting for Serge’s failure. 

“We have to try again, no?”

On the fifth trial, Serge was desperate. The burns on his leg radiated pain, and the idea of getting a roll had driven him wild. Serge ran his nails on the seams in the bathroom drawers and came up with two women’s hairpins. He used one to open the cuffs while he was still alone in the bathroom. He fit the second pin into a hole in the hem of his shirt. 

Just as he was done stashing it, Papa came in and found him on the floor of the bathroom. He smiled wide and Serge felt impossibly hopeful that he’d done something right. 

“Well, done, my love. We will keep working.” 

The  _ working  _ was not just getting out of handcuffs. Whatever was happening to Papa’s mind had seized him with the belief that the world was about to fall to war, and he needed to train Serge for the battle. He made no attempt to correct Papa’s delusion, recognizing the chance he was given. 

After years of being beaten for so much as looking at Papa’s weapons, he was taught to assemble them, and which bullets go in which gun. Papa kissed his face when Serge assembled a glock even faster than  _ he could.  _

“Soon I will let you practice with one.” 

Papa let him eat every day to build his strength. One day, he left Serge alone and only used handcuffs and the closet to keep him in the room. Serge could escape easily. He could have escaped even before he had the hairpin and knew how to get out of the cuffs. And now he knew how to do that, and even how to pick the closet door. 

But he didn't. When Papa came back was dark again. He crouched on the floor to take in Serge. Still wearing the cuffs, waiting obediently. Papa pet him like a dog and murmured what a good boy he was. Serge nearly choked on a muddy mix of joy and despair. 

The process lasted four months. Papa was drunk with power, Serge could feel it. Every time he taught his son a skill that could be used to escape his grasp that Serge didn’t use, he became more affectionate and freer with water, blankets, everything. He no longer grasped the bony point of Serge’s elbow while walking down the street. Serge eyed every alley they passed that he could run down. 

He didn’t run. Not until things were alright for a long time, then Papa made them very bad, all at once. 

When they arrived in Berlin and Papa told him, “We have an agreement with the hotel manager. You do. Go downstairs.” 

No. No this is not happening. Serge hovered by the bathroom door of their new room, not wanting to move and get closer to what he knew as coming. “I thought I didn’t have to anymore.” 

Papa laughed at him. “Did you decide that on your own? You are the stupidest boy in the country. You don’t decide anything. You’re mine. Go downstairs.” 

He had to run. 

“Do I go now?” 

Papa held his lit cigarette away from his mouth, a not-so-subtle threat. “What do you think? Since you’re so smart, you tell me.” 

He waited, but Papa didn't stand up to walk him down. To grip the back of his neck while he outlined terms with this manager. 

Papa was letting him leave the room himself. 

“How long?” Serge asked. 

“As long as he wants you.” 

“Will you check on me?” 

Papa preened at the faith, the power he believed Serge had given him. 

“I will check in the morning. If he calls though, if he complains, I will come right down, yes?”

Serge noded passively and followed Papa’s directions to the manager's apartment on the first floor. Maybe Papa would think the manager killed him, and he’d remember how obedient and good Serge was the last time he saw him. 

When Serge got to the manager’s apartment, he let the man touch over his face before knocking him out with a small painted statue of a boy holding balloons, and dragged him to the radiator, tying him to it with an apron and the strongest knots he knew. 

“Sh, sh,” Serge said as the man came to and struggled and tried to spit out the washcloth duct taped into his mouth. He yanked hard, trying to break the knots of the apron holding him and Serge grinned at him. “This is the most solid part of the building, you know that. Don’t worry. My father will come to check you in the morning.” 

He couched below the window looking onto the street and waited until he saw his father leave the building, walk down the road and disappear. 

Serge stole up to the hotel room, retrieved four of the passports Papa made for him, and all the money he could find. 

And then he disappeared too. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


In America, the word  _ Serge  _ never passes his lips. He can't pass for anything but European, his still stilted English and thick accent ensure that. But he can play on American ignorance. He can mock Johns who assume he is French when really he is Belgian. Polish. Lithuanian. Israeli. His name is Mattheo, Tomas, Isaac, Dennis. 

It's another girl on the street who names him. 

When he first escaped, he had no idea how to talk to other teenagers. Speaking truthfully, he didn't know how to talk to anyone. But survival was a quick teacher. By the time he landed in New York and was scouting a corner of the city, he knew what to do. 

Serge was maybe fifteen, or maybe nineteen. He wasn’t strictly sure. Time got hard, Papa kept him drugged a lot at first and he didn’t really know how long at first was. Time stayed mixed up even after. But he did know he was better off with street kids than trying to cut it on his own in a city he didn’t know. It only took a day in a city to find a group he thought was worth trying to join. 

There were a lot of kids, mostly older. He’d fit in fine. Business was slow in the early evening, but the activity of the kids spread out of the bodega corner covered up cars stopping, and quiet handoffs. 

He took a moment to assess who was in charge. He quickly landed on a girl with thick dark hair and eyes so light she might be blind. Younger girls came to talk to her before they left the corner, and a boy came by and handed her something small before retreating away from her to lean on the wall. 

She was fifteen or maybe nineteen. And she was in charge. 

When he walked up to her, she flicked a gaze his way, but took her time turning away from the girl talking to her before acknowledging him. Other kids pulled away and Serge realized they weren’t sure if he was John or another kid. He hadn’t ditched the clothes he came over in; A white collared shirt and khakis. They were beat up enough at this point that he looked like a John to steer clear of. The girl had trained the other kids well. 

“Do you have a cigarette?” he asked her. 

  
She tilted her head. A John wouldn’t ask for a cigarette. She reached in her back pocket and held out a pack of American Spirits. He took one without breaking eye contact. 

“Where are you from?” 

“Romania.” 

She smiles and shook her head. Her teeth were pearly white and threatening. “No. Try again.”

“You think I’m lying?” 

“Navy brat. I know my accents. I think you’re French. South of France.” 

Any alarm at being made was overwhelmed by a feeling of kinship. He does not know what “Navy brat” means, but she is knowledgeable and powerful. Just as he knew she was in charge, she had him figured out. 

“Not anymore,” he allows. 

“Name?” 

“No name.” 

“Ah. No trouble, we’ll take care of that.” 

He earns her trust by taking a trick without hesitation and returning unruffled. He is invited back to the abandoned office building they are staying in. The other kids talk fast, with accents unlike American television and he struggles to understand. It’s no matter, because he understands the girl in charge. She invites him into the office break room she staked out as her own and offers him her joint. 

“You are pimp, yes?” he asks. She is perfectly still as she looks at him with judgement. “No?” 

“I’m a broker.” 

“Breaker? You break?” 

“Bro _ ker.  _ It means I connect people who need work to people who need workers. That’s all. If I don't help, I don’t take a cut. Protection is a cut, finding a client is a cut. It’s simple. Did I ask you for money today? A pimp would ask for money.” 

A pimp wouldn’t ask for money until he invented some burdensome cost his whore incurred and must pay off, and could never pay off. 

He doesn’t speak English well enough to say that. 

“A pimp would not yet.” 

She holds her hand out for her joint and he hands it over. “I am no pimp. I’m a saint. If you want to leave, you may. If you want to stay, all I ask is for rent. Flat fee. Only a few tricks a week.” 

He knows right away not to trust it. Someone who doesn’t want a piece of him is someone who cannot be relied upon. She will change the rules the second it benefits her. 

One week. He will stay one week to learn the norms of New York, then he will make his own way. It’s a strangely serene week, filled with pizza and commiserating over minor daily woes. He almost doesn’t want to leave, but he has to. He must make it alone. 

The day before he leaves them, he finally asks for her name. None of the other kids call her anything.

“Sweetheart,” she says, so easily it’s as though she’s amused he hasn’t asked sooner.

“ _ Chéri _ .” 

“Cherie?’ 

“That is French. Sweetheart is English for  _ chéri _ .” 

She is still for a long time then finally rolls her eyes. “Ah. Well your name is Frenchie. That’s English for French.” 

  
  


* * *

  
  


It’s many years before he sees her again. He hasn’t turned tricks in a year at least and makes a tidy living killing for anyone who can pay. The first woman, the one in the Midtown elevator haunts him. When he returns to the hire to produce proof of death shaking and sweaty, the hire smirks and asks, “Your first?” 

It’s not his first. He’s not sure how many John’s he’s killed. But they broke agreements. This woman has done nothing to him. She is his first. The first that counts. 

“It will get easier,” the hire mocks. 

It does and it doesn’t.

The moment a body slumps to the ground feels more sickening each time. But the closet of an apartment he reutrns to each day makes it all worth it. After a lifetime spent in hotel rooms, either at his father’s control or the necessity of his work, paying rent is the most exciting part of each month. 

His apartment has stained walls, and sometimes the water runs brown. But the bed is always his, and the food is always his. Frenchie can have whoever he likes over, and fuck whoever he likes, and no one else. If he wants to be alone he can kick whoever is there out and they cannot stop him because it is  _ his.  _ He can blast hip hop and leave the TV on all night. If Frenchie wants, he can watch  _ Golden Girls _ DVDs for a week straight, no one touches him while he does unless he wants to. 

Killing is dirty, ugly work, but living is not. And Frenchie has the right to live. He decided that long ago. And he knows how to go it alone. 

Then one day, it is Cherie who can pay. 

His usual connections have no work, but they refer him to “a real bitch” who may have something. He receives instructions to meet in a clinic waiting room of all places. The description he receives for her is simply, “You will know her when you see her.” 

Frenchie gives himself enough credit not to doubt that, but when he walks into the overlit crowded clinic and sees Sweetheart, it seems too easy to be true. 

Her hair is just as thick and dark, and her eyes are just as light. She catches his eye then looks back at the Highlights magazine in her hands. He waits by the door until a seat clears beside her and he casually sits beside her. 

“You like the Highlights?’ he asks quietly. 

“I like the mazes,” she says. 

“They can be quite tricky,” he says. 

She hands him the magazine and says, “Then why don’t you give it a try.” 

He presses his hands over the magazine and feels the indentation of a folded piece of paper inside. “I feel we have met before, no?” 

“I don’t think so,” she says. 

“Are you sure,  _ mon chéri _ ?” 

He sees her fight a smile. “And you, you are Romanian?” 

And then, all at once, the powerful girl on the corner is in his life again. 

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Cherie makes it clear she is in charge at every turn. She chooses where they order food from. She decides when they spend time together. He doesn't touch her a second sooner than she decides. And when that day does come, Cherie is in charge, exclusively. She decides what happens.

“What’s off limits?” she asks before they even have sex. They’re sitting in his bed and she’s sharpening a knife with a whetstone on a towel. He rolls a joint and marvels at how she manages to be balanced in her work on the lump mattress. 

“I don’t understand,” he says. 

“What do you tell Johns they can’t do? And anything else in addition. I am not a John, I have no interest in raping you.” 

“You cannot rape me.” 

“No?” She holds up her knife. “So I can cut you? Tie and gag you, leave you alone, bound and helpless?” 

His heart beats in is ears. “I would not be helpless,” Serge says. Frenchie says. 

“What did you tell Johns they couldn’t do?” 

The list is short and useless. 

“You can do what you want. I love you, you can take anything.” 

He’s told Cherie he loves her countless times. She is always silent in response. 

“I like to tie people down. Yes or no?” 

She’s serious. She wants to--

Wants to know if he wants it. She thinks he might want it. 

“No.” 

“Gags?” 

_ “No. _ ” 

So he makes a list. The list becomes long. So long that he waits for Cherie to get annoyed and walk out forever. But she writes it all down in her new smartphone. No cigarettes. Not even holding them during. No burns at all. No confinement at all. No calling him stupid. 

No stroking his face. 

That one he is sure will lose her. Cherie is the most tactile person he’s ever met. She touches strangers faces. Surely that is unreasonable. That must be the final blow. 

But she writes it down. 

This list is real. Cherie texts him the list and then produces a list of her own. The list makes him nauseous at the things she’s have to cross off, but very little is new. He agrees. She is in charge, he is okay with that. He likes it even. He likes it most days, especially when nothing on his list ever comes up again. 

Cherie never says she loves him, but Frenchie can’t stop saying it. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


Cherie is not Frenchie’s girlfriend. She makes sure he knows that. Sometimes she makes sure he knows by dropping off the radar for months, but she always comes back. 

She finds Frenchie in his new apartment easily. When he says, “I've told no one I moved,” she just smiles. 

“I’m not no one.” 

She has come when he’s in a bad spell. It happens, sometimes. He’s tired, and irritable and no amount of intoxicant or music can help it. But it’s not like when Papa is in a bad spell. He stays far away from everyone as possible, only venturing out when the drugs or money run out. Papa would never pull away to avoid pulling someone else under. Frenchie is not Papa, but when he comes out of the bathroom and finds Cherie on his couch, he can’t bring himself to ask her to leave. 

He can’t bring himself to do anything but lay his head in her lap. Cherie smells like lavender and cigarettes and he breathes it in. 

She chuckles. “My sensitive man. You poor baby. May I stroke your hair?” 

Frenchie buzzed most of it off since he saw her, there’s not much to stroke, but he nods quickly and she stops the movement with a firm hand on his scalp. 

“How long has it been like this?” He doesn’t respond. “Maybe we need to get you some Zoloft, hm?”

They watch TV. The TV has been on for eleven days. She flips through and stops on an old episode of 20/20 that Frenchie has seen a thousand times since he came to America. 

“Oh,” she says softly. 

_ Tonight we’re speaking to the family who has gone through what no family should ever go through. On an unusually warm November day, twelve year old Savannah Jaffe got off her school bus and was never seen again. Tonight we speak to the police involved in bringing this precious girl home as well as her devastated family.  _

“The father is a pervert,” Frenchie warns her. 

Cherie looks down at him. “Why do you say that?” 

“I know perverts,” he says simply, “They do not even suspect him. I am sure he killed his daughter.” 

“Nah,” Cherie says, continuing to stroke his hair, “His daughter is alive. He is a pervert though, you got that right.” 

Frenchie understands all at once. A photo of Savannah fills the screen. She’s playing with some sort of children’s toy kitchen. Her hair is thick and dark. Her eyes are so light she almost looks blind. 

He tries to take his head off Cherie’s lap, but she holds it down firmly, not letting him move an inch.

“Is he responsible for her disappearance?” he asks. 

“Oh goodness no,” Cherie murmurs, “What kind of father would let harm befall his child. What kind of father would trade his child to pal from his internet pervert club? No one would ever do that.”

This special is at least five years old, it would be simple to find Savannah’s mother. She’s right there on the screen with a phone number under her face. 

“Why not go home? Tell your mama?” he asks. “You know where home is.” 

Serge knows what happens next in the special. Savannah’s mother cries and says she just wants her daughter back. France doesn’t have television programs like this, but he knows if they did his mother would go on it. He knows that she must have told the police happened, but as Papa always said,  _ “Who would take a boy from his father?”  _

Cherie leans over him to turn off the TV. “They don’t want this version of me, trust me. They barely wanted the version that disappeared.” 

Mama would be devastated to see who her son had become. Disgusted. He never tried to go home. He didn’t try even after months went by without Papa finding him. The idea of it was too painful, why would he think it was any different for Cherie?

But. 

“I love this version of you,” he says. 

“You should.”

He’s never told anyone. No one has ever gotten close to him wanting to tell. That he is the same as her, he knows what it is to be a casualty. Cherie gives him almost nothing about herself, he owes it to her to tell her that he knows exactly what is like to be stolen and destroyed. 

“We are just the same,” he says. That is all he can say. 

Cherie is silent for a while, then she laughs. “We are well matched. I will give you that.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Content notes: !! Lots! Frenchie being held captive by his father, terrorized by his father, implied human trafficking both orchestrated by adults and minors, discussion of Frenchie killing for money, setting boundaries in consensual sex, discussed kidnapping, discussed sexual abuse, discussed trauma responses
> 
> *Deep breath*
> 
> Comment pls!


End file.
